LIKE THE Cold War, the war on terrorism is partly a battle of ideas–ideas about, for example, the tension between truth and tolerance. Some of the challenges before us are suggested in the juxtaposition of two documents relating to the American founding, one an authentic letter from George Washington, the other a vicious forgery attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

President Washington’s famous letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, dated August 17, 1790, expresses the notion–still today revolutionary in much of the world–that citizens possess freedom of conscience not as a gift of government but as a right: